Everybody in my middle school took a class in logo during 7th grade (12-13 years old) - it alternated with keyboarding and was taught by a math teacher. The first half of the class was basic programming and logo concepts, and the second half was a "final project" - a program that had to be at least a few minutes long and tell a story..basically a primitive flash movie.
The story was completely up to us with some constraints.
My project replicated a mario level. Mario dropped out of the sky, with his theme music playing. There were text boxes that had narration. he moved his way across the level, ducked under and jumped over arrows from Zelda guys, squashed them, used a turtle to kill Wario, entered the castle to rescue the princess, only to find it empty (the princess is in another castle!).
I loved that class, and although I was relatively clueless to the concepts I was being taught, what I did learn was very helpful later when I actually got interested in programming and started toying with vb.net, asp and php.
I wish I could list what I did learn, but it's been 10 years... There's no reason to view logo as "senseless shapes" or too basic - it depends on your area but you would have to balance that with your knowledge of the students prior knowledge.
Also, The first "real" language I used was vb.net, and looking back, while I didn't learn alot about data structures and such (that may have been my teacher though, I don't think he knew that much in retrospect), I did make tetris, brick breaker and tic tac toe. I liked the gui aspect. There was some overhead learning the windows forms, but it was pretty intuitive with
Sorry, I ramble
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